Re: weird throughput on write to SATA disk

From: Alan Cox
Date: Mon Oct 13 2008 - 18:39:55 EST


On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:07:15 -0700
"Grant Grundler" <grundler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 12:19 PM, kenneth johansson <ken@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > When writing data to /dev/sdb (that is the whole disk and no filesystem)
> > it starts out ok around 100MB/sec but soon end up doing considerably
> > worse. For prolonged times lasting several minutes it hovers in the
> > 20-30MB/sec.
>
> Is the application using "O_DIRECT"?
> If not, could be issue with how VM writeback is (not) working.

Or just mashing up the I/O horribly. Would also be worth turning the CFQ
scheduler off or applying Arjan van de Ven's patches to fix the ioprio of
the kernel writeout threads. That last patch makes a huge difference here.

Alan
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